poaching

Abstract

Do managers take key clients with them when they switch firms? Despite the large interest from business and employment law, the paucity of data prevented empirical work on customer poaching. We use Hungarian administrative data on workers and buying firms to estimate the incidence of customer poaching, and the private and social returns to knowledge about individual customers. We build a model of buyer-specific manager capital ("rapport") to interpret our results and evaluate various non-compete policies.